The lost Hitchcock film that contains the seeds of Vertigo and North by Northwest

The director Alfred Hitchcock is one of the rare filmmakers whose surname has become an adjective. If something is dubbed “Hitchcockian”, it usually means it will be surprising, tense, and entirely gripping. Not for nothing was Hitchcock known as the Master of Suspense. And the major films that he made, from Psycho and Vertigo to The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, stand the test of time admirably, and remain vastly influential in film, television and literature alike.

Yet a century ago, Hitchcock was not the long-established maestro of mystery that he later became. Instead, the young east-ender had begun working in the then-nascent motion picture business in 1919, as a title-card designer for Islington Studios. Hitchcock later described his work in this silent era as being both menial and vital to the success of the film. “In those days, it was possible to completely alter the meaning of a script through the use of narrative titles and spoken titles. Since the actor pretended to speak and the dialogue appeared on the screen right afterwards, they could put whatever words they liked in his mouth.”

Hitchcock concluded knowingly that “many a bad picture was saved in this way”, because “one could really do anything – take the end of a picture and put it at the beginning – anything at all!” For a director who would later become notorious for his apparently cavalier treatment of those around him, and who believed that actors should be treated like “cattle”, this opportunity to exert control, even from his apparently lowly position, was one well worth taking. He worked on eight films between 1920 and 1921, with titles such as The Princess of New York, Dangerous Lies and The Mystery Road, and he became known for imbuing his title cards with literary flair. A typical one read: “Birds flying, hearts breaking, candles guttering.”

The ambitious young man was promoted to art director in mid-1921, which gave him a chance to research the intimate details of filmmaking, encompassing everything from finding real-life locations that could be used for production, to some second unit direction of his own, doing what he later called “odd jobs of going out to shoot odd little entrances and exits on interiors”. Before long, the art director was all but controlling the films he was working on. As he later said: “I was quite dogmatic. I mean, I would build a set and say to the director, ‘Here’s where it’s shot from.’”

Subsequently, Hitchcock liked to give the impression that his first work as director proper came on a 1923 short comedy called Always Tell Your Wife, which starred a well-known music hall performer called Seymour Hicks. In a 1962 talk with fellow director Fran?ois Truffaut, he recalled: “One day, [Hicks] quarrelled with the director and said to me, ‘Let’s you and me finish this thing by ourselves.’ So I helped him and we completed the picture.”

Hicks’s own account was that he had been on the verge of abandoning the project “when a fat youth who was in charge of the property room at the studio volunteered to help me. As I liked the boy and as he seemed tremendously enthusiastic and anxious to try his hand at producing, we carried on as co-directors.” Either way, it established the young Hitchcock as a capable filmmaker, especially in extremis.

The film, which was a moderate success by the standards of the day, led to Hitchcock being hired to co-write and, uncredited, help direct a stage adaptation called Woman to Woman the same year. It was an especially significant picture for Hitchcock on a personal level because he met his wife Alma Reville, who was working on the picture as its editor. She would become his most important collaborator, and would later co-write some of his most famous pictures, including The Lady Vanishes, Sabotage and his own personal favourite film, Shadow of a Doubt.

However, as Truffaut and others reminded Hitchcock – whose love of dramatic and comic stories often overshadowed the more mundane truth – Woman to Woman was not the first time that he was entrusted with control of a picture. Instead, the 1922 film Number Thirteen, also known as Mrs Peabody, had been intended as his debut.

Yet, when he was asked about it, Hitchcock became evasive. He said to Truffaut merely that the “two-reeler” was never completed, and explained its existence in broad terms. “There was a woman working at the studio who had worked with Charlie Chaplin. In those days anyone who had worked with Chaplin was top drawer; she had written a story and we found a little money.” The unnamed woman was identified by the Hitchcock expert John Russell Taylor as Anita Ross, who worked at the Islington Studios, but there is no record either of Ross’s association with Chaplin, or of her working on any other pictures at the time.

Hitchcock himself mentioned the name Elsie Codd in a 1972 interview with the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich, and this seems more likely. Codd had worked with Chaplin as his publicist in his silent film days and had briefly been at his side in Hollywood, even featuring as an extra in his first feature-length film, 1921’s The Kid, before returning to England and pursuing a writing career, albeit mainly articles about her association with the star.

Hitchcock assembled many of the cast and crew that he had worked with as an art director for the film. Joe Rosenthal Jr, who shot many of the early Islington films, was hired as cameraman, and the actress Clare Greet was cast in the lead, after having worked with Hitchcock on the comedy Three Live Ghosts. She would subsequently collaborate with him several more times; they made a total of nine films together, right up into the 1930s.

She appeared opposite the stage actor Ernest Thesiger, who when asked about his experiences serving in the First World War, was said to have replied: “Oh, my dears! The noise! And the people!”

The script, whether written by Ross, Codd or another, was a simple, short film set around a tenement building. Hitchcock described the storyline in 1930. “The plot consisted of the dream of a charlady who, having bought a lottery ticket, optimistically dreamed of wealth. All her friends were honoured guests at her mansion – a gentleman who had been particularly kind to her being permitted to wear a diadem from morning to night – and all her enemies became her servants.”

Although the plot sounded like a simple exercise in wish-fulfilment, it is possible to glimpse traces of what would become subsequent Hitchcockian motifs. Dreaming and blurring the line between fantasy and reality would be crucial to his films Vertigo and Spellbound, complete with its Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence.

Meanwhile, a topsy-turvy world in which people’s identities became disrupted and flipped figured in everything from North by Northwest, in which Cary Grant’s unwitting protagonist is pursued across America by a shadowy espionage organisation, to his sombre Henry Fonda drama The Wrong Man, where an impoverished musician is wrongly accused of a crime. Had the film existed, it would be a treasure trove for Hitchcock scholars and Freudian analysts alike, but, unfortunately, only scant information about its abortive production remains.

Hitchcock headed to Rotherhithe in south London to shoot Number Thirteen, but it proved to be a difficult experience for its untested director. As he said a few years later: “Unfortunately, as a production unit we were so inexperienced that we made it as a straight comedy instead of farce; so it was shelved.”

It was not a happy production. Greet had to contribute her own money in order to keep the film going, and Hitchcock had to ask his uncle John, the wealthy proprietor of a chain of greengrocers, to invest in it, too. But even with their subsidy, Hitchcock was unable to complete the modest two-reel picture, and hurriedly moved on to other projects.

It remains unfinished and lost, with only a few stills from its production existing in Thesiger’s personal archive. And its director was always dismissive of it, saying to his biographer Donald Spoto that its failure was ‘a somewhat chastening experience’ and to Truffaut simply “it wasn’t very good, really”, and blamed the withdrawal of American money from Islington Studios for its failure.

Yet it has recently transpired that the film might have had an afterlife, if things had been slightly different. In 1925, when Hitchcock was established as a regular director for Gainsborough Studios, the successor to Islington Studios, there was legislation introduced to keep a minimum number of British films in the cinemas, so that they were not entirely overwhelmed by Hollywood imports.

The producer Michael Balcon, who would later go on to found Ealing Studios, asked the director Adrian Brunel to see if there was anything that could be done to rehabilitate Number Thirteen. Brunel had built a name for himself as a “fixer” of troubled projects, whether retitling, re-editing or doing additional shooting for them. He watched what existed of the film and wrote to Balcon in November 1925 that “I have talked this over with Hitch himself and we agree that [reshooting] this will not be a cheap proposition, as so much new stuff will have to be shot... I have several ideas for expanding it but I would ask you to see the picture first if you can possibly manage it.”

He apologised for the delay in contacting his colleague, saying: “Please do not think that it is through lack of interest that I have not brought the matter up before. I have not pressed the question as I knew that it would entail more money than you anticipated to put the film right. But now with the quota coming into force, the whole situation is different.”

Balcon’s reply is not recorded, but, certainly, the opportunity to revisit Number Thirteen was never taken, and Hitchcock proceeded with his next film, The Mountain Eagle, which has also been lost. The latter regularly tops lists of the most sought-after lost pictures in the world. Its predecessor has not received anything like the same interest, not least because of Hitchcock’s own dismissal of it.

But if it should emerge, dustily, from some vault or archive one of these days, film scholars and Hitchcock obsessives will doubtless fall upon it.

As for the rest of us, its discovery would establish whether it is nothing more than a diverting historical artefact, or genuine indication of a talent that would emerge, triumphantly, a mere five years later with his first “proper” film, 1927’s The Lodger, and established a legendary career. Either way, we can only hope for its eventual appearance.